Self-leadership is about understanding yourself and using that understanding to change your behaviours and improve the contribution you make to the world around you. It means reflecting on how you’ve got to where you are and so far and gathering insights into how your day-to-day desires and motivations are influencing your decisions as a leader.
You can break self-leadership down into three elements:
- Doing more of what you love
- Matching decisions and actions to your values
- Self-coaching
Doing more of what you love
It’s no good trying to want different things – your desires are a part of you and if you’re aware of them, it’s more likely that you can use them to positively influence your leadership in the baby room. For example, you can think about the bits of the job that you truly love:
- Is it offering a safe base to the youngest children in the room?
- Is it the outdoors play with the children, when you get to be in the fresh air?
- Is it conversations with parents at the end of the day?
- Is it imagining a future nursery you’d like to own and manage?
- Is it brainstorming activity ideas with your team?
Knowing which bits of the job resonate for you gives you a chance to align more of your day with what you love doing – to embrace your potential strengths as a leader. If you have a passion for being outdoors, you can think about how you bring that to your distinctive leadership in the baby room? If you love the conversations with parents, you can think about ways to bring parents and carers into the baby room even more – through stay and play sessions for example, or parent coffee mornings. What you love then becomes the basis for making a special contribution through your leadership.
Matching decisions and actions to your values
As well as doing more of what we love, we also need to make sure that our day-to-day behaviours are aligned with what we value the most.
Your values as a baby room leader are personal to you. One baby room leader might value fun or curiosity, while another values nurture and responsibility. You might place a high value on reliability and consistency, while another baby room leader values spontaneity much more highly.
Self-coaching
Do you believe that we can all change, grow and develop?
Self-leadership is about growing the inner voice that helps us to change, grow and develop: an inner coach, who we can turn to for support, guidance and challenge.
The opposite of self-coaching is resigning ourselves to the situation now and believing that we can do nothing to change it e.g. ‘I don’t like working in the baby room and I never will, but this is what I chose as my job and so I need to stick it out’. This kind of thinking doesn’t help you, your colleagues and it definitely doesn’t help the babies and families served by the baby room. Of course you can’t lie to yourself – if you’re not enjoying your job it’s really important to recognise this and then work with it, to think about how you can positively change the situation.
You can check in with your own inner voice now to see whether it’s tuned into self-coaching or whether it’s tending towards defeatism. Take an area of weakness in your practice as a baby room leader – something you feel stressed, upset or worried about – and see what kind of messages you give yourself about that area of practice. For example, if you find it hard to have difficult conversations with parents, reflect on how you approach this part of the job. Is it something that you just have to deal with and get through, or is it an area of improvement that you’re positively trying to work on?